A Thin Blue Line in Battle Fatigues

The nation was stunned at the sight of local police officers armed for a military siege in Ferguson, Mo., when protesters took to the streets last month after the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager. Armed with assault rifles, laser scopes and tear gas grenades, the police appeared primed for a domestic Desert Storm, not a crowd of impassioned citizens.

Police forces have become increasingly militarized in the last 40 years, many getting free Pentagon war-surplus material, supposedly to use against drug dealers and terrorists. Senators at a hearing last week questioned why local police needed the 11,959 bayonets distributed by the Pentagon since 2006, and why 13 local police forces with fewer than 10 officers are now equipped with anti-mine-and-ambush vehicles designed for the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon program has provided more than $5 billion in equipment since the 1990s to local departments, allowing a one-man police force in a small Michigan town to garner 13 military-grade assault weapons.

It is the military gear and garb that “reinforces a war-fighting mentality among civilian police,” one witness at the Senate hearing noted. Congress first approved war-surplus materials for civilian police in the 1970s — no small coup back then for those interested in law-and-order politicking and currying favor with defense contractors. There are bipartisan proposals to have Congress take the lead in demilitarizing the police. Lawmakers should move swiftly on these measures so that police forces don’t become standing armies.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A28 of the New York edition with the headline: A Thin Blue Line in Battle Fatigues . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe